While carbon offsets are controversial and always will be, they have enormous potential to promote an elusive goal: sustainable development. At their best, carbon offsets are a low-cost way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transfer clean technology to poor countries and help people out of poverty. Which brings us to JPMorgan Chase and cook stoves. The global Wall Street investment bank has begun subsidizing the production and distribution of efficient cooking stoves in Africa, an effort that could expand to India and southeast Asia as well. The project is the topic of today’s Sustainability column on fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how it begins: By any measure, it is a long way from the Park Avenue headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, the global investment bank that

Carbon neutral, you may remember, was the word of the year back in 2006, but as my friend Joel Makower (executive editor of greenbiz.com, aka the guru of green business) has written, no one knows exactly what it means or even how to define a company’s carbon footprint.So when Dell announced today that the company had become carbon neutral, I decided to take a closer look in my Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how the column begins:Dell is announcing Wednesday that it has become carbon neutral by turning out the lights in its offices, buying wind power and protecting endangered forests in Madagascar.It’s all part of CEO Michael Dell’s commitment to make the company that he started back in 1984 “the greenest technology company on the planet.”But

There’s a fair bit of cynicism out there about Product (Red), the celebrity-inspired idea that we can help poor victims of AIDS in Africa by going shopping. See, for example, the pointed parody at www.buylesscrap.org, which says, among other things, “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.”Then again, there’s this number: $110 million. That’s the amount of money that (Red) partners have generated for the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide AIDS treatment in Ghana, Rwanda, Swaziland and Lesotho. Bono and Bobby Shriver created Product (Red) a couple of years ago, and now you can buy (Red) phones from Motorola, (Red) iPods from

CEO Neville Isdell is an environmentalist, but making The Coca-Cola Co. sustainable is harder than it looks.